They have bigger caches (less time spent waiting for memory), more logic units, deeper pipelines, and can handle far more 'in-flight' instructions.
That said, the smart phones of today probably do have more power than desktop computers of about 10 years ago.
edit: now that I think about it, a order of magnitude is probably generous, but I would still guess that it's at least a factor > 2.
Texas Instruments OMAP4460 (in Galaxy Nexus at 1,2 GHz): 2047.7 BogoMIPS
1.7 GHz Xeon from 2006 (the small EC2 instance, single-core): 5203.55 BogoMIPS
Would be interesting to see some real benchmarks though..
Bogomips lives up to its name.
I suspect that compiling has fairly poor locality and is quite cache dependent, so you might be better off just benchmarking on a mobile cpu.
Geekbench 2 on iPhone 4S: 617 Geekbench 2 32bit on iMac i7 @ 2.80GHz: 8557
They have bigger caches (less time spent waiting for memory), more logic units, deeper pipelines, and can handle far more 'in-flight' instructions.
That said, the smart phones of today probably do have more power than desktop computers of about 10 years ago.
edit: now that I think about it, a order of magnitude is probably generous, but I would still guess that it's at least a factor > 2.